


Encircle Me

by luninosity



Series: Like Sugar (Spell It Out) [2]
Category: Actor RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Arranged Marriage, Consensual Kink, Contracts, Developing Relationship, Dom/sub, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, Explicit Sexual Content, Falling In Love, Kink Negotiation, Love, M/M, discussion of lots of kinks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 07:32:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2261190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Negotiation, checklists, sandwiches, and the first day of being married. Also, sex on a very patient sofa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Encircle Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ninemoons42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [Encircle Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2327843) by [ogawaryoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ogawaryoko/pseuds/ogawaryoko)



> Title from Tegan & Sara's "The Con" this time.
> 
> Contains BRIEF discussion of all sorts of kinks, everything from restraints to spanking to watersports to bloodplay, as they work their way through checklists. The more intense kinks will probably not make another appearance.

_ Chris _   
  
Sebastian’s place, while small, is not as small as Chris’d been expecting from the description. There’s still no room for him to move in, though. And his heart, overworked by the oscillating demands of the last forty-eight hours plus this last-straw comprehension, wants to run away and hide somewhere for a while.   
  
He glances around while Sebastian locks the door behind them. The place is beautiful, really. Sebastian decorates like music-notes: clean crisp markings over a cool blank page, with unexpected quirks of scribbled-over personal notation. Passion glowing through. Unthinking carelessly lovely style.   
  
The windows are wide, the apartment high enough to overlook the park and the city skyline beyond, and afternoon light floods the space with honeyed gold. The living room’s not large but friendly, sofa crooked in an inviting L-shape, cushions in shades of blue and black and cream and brown. Sebastian hadn’t been lying about getting dressed in a hurry, the day before; a forgotten black leather jacket’s flung across the back of one tolerant chair, left by a distracted hand.   
  
Distracted. Sebastian had been, yes, that first morning. If that’s the right word.   
  
This afternoon his submissive’s been very quiet. Quiet in the taxi, during the ride up the elevator, while unearthing keys.   
  
Chris stops attempting to discover all the intricacies of Sebastian’s place and looks at the owner himself. Sebastian doesn’t look up, hands too occupied with a door-lock that should only require a flick of fingers; but then he does, as if feeling the weight of Chris’s gaze. There’re small tense lines around his eyes, but he’s smiling wryly. “So. Home.”   
  
“Home,” Chris echoes, and drops both overnight bags and takes a step closer, one hand lifting. He can’t help wanting to touch. He’s always liked touching people, especially the people he cares about: physical underscoring of presence and connection. He’s aware that this may have something to do with loss, with anxiety, with coping mechanisms. He doesn’t care if it does, as long as other people don’t care, and Sebastian did say yes to being within arm’s reach. “Still okay?”   
  
“Honestly?” One corner of that mobile mouth quirks up. One hand touches the line of the collar. Rueful fingers. “I don’t know. Can we…you said not at home…maybe someday, but not now…if you wouldn’t mind.”   
  
“Oh, fuck,” Chris says, plus a few more profanities in his head for good measure, “yeah, yes, of course, come here—or you can, you don’t need me to, it doesn’t lock, or I can, whatever—”   
  
“You can.” Sebastian’s fingers’re shaking. Almost unnoticeably. But Chris is noticing now. “You did put it on me, sir. Chris. I wouldn’t—it wouldn’t feel right if I—well. _Mama dracului._ That…I did not precisely expect that.”   
  
“What? Can you tell me? Also, did you just call me Dracula’s mother?” He steps in as Sebastian turns; sets fingers over the buckle, tugs, tries to balance speed and tenderness. No stray hair caught in loops, but fast enough to hopefully let Sebastian know he’s both listening and taking care. “And thank you for asking. For telling me what you need.”   
  
“General mother of a bloodsucking devil. Not directed at you specifically. You said you wanted me to be honest.” Collar off, Sebastian exhales, and the stiffness in his shoulders eases. Weight lifted. Chris understands why, and hurts with the understanding.    
  
Sebastian doesn’t turn around, but does tilt his head enough to glance at Chris over his right shoulder.  “I was…I am…surprised that it wouldn’t feel right. If I removed it after you put it on. The thought isn’t…comfortable. Surprised is not the word. Shocked, potentially. Hence the maternal bloodsucking devil.”   
  
“I’m asking, please tell me, are you okay,” Chris says, collar loose and dangling in one hand, the other hovering a gasp above Sebastian’s shoulder, craving contact. He quite simply desperately needs to know.   
  
“I am as okay as one might be, learning new aspects of oneself on the spot.” Sebastian sighs. The smile reappears, bittersweet and beckoning. “You realize I’ve not said no about touching me. I like it. I would like it now.”   
  
Chris exhales, says, “Yeah,” and lets his hand fall onto slim strong muscles, lets himself almost unconsciously pull Sebastian closer, run fingers over his chest, fold him under an arm. He tosses the collar at the chair with the jacket on the back, where it lands in mocking safety; Sebastian leans against him, eyes closing, head on Chris’s shoulder in turn.   
  
They stay that way for a while, under the indolent rays of westering sun, only breathing.   
  
Eventually Sebastian inquires, not moving, “Would you like a tour? I know we won’t be here for…long…”   
  
“Sorry. Again.”   
  
“ _Opri asta_. Stop that. Let me show you the place. Our place, I suppose it is now. Come on.”   
  
Chris keeps hold of his hand as they walk. Sebastian’s said he can. And it’s grounding. He hopes it’s grounding for them equally.   
  
Sebastian waves at the living room-kitchen-entertainment space with one hand—“we’ll come back—” and takes him down the single hallway to both bedrooms, which is practically speaking only one bedroom because the first one is undeniably the lair of a musician and songwriter. Sebastian blushes a little—“I didn’t expect company, sorry—” but Chris just pokes his head in and is awestruck. A computer with dual monitors and sound-system hookups he doesn’t recognize and wouldn’t begin to know how to name. Several awards, not that elusive Oscar but from recognizably prominent organizations, gathering dust on a back shelf. Scattered notebooks and sheet music and what seem to be script pages piled across the clean modern lines of the desk. Instruments, so many instruments, keyboard and guitars and a harp and possibly a ukulele all communing in happy anticipation.    
  
He thinks he spots a recognizable sheet of thick paper propped up on the far side of the monitors. Blue and green and silver colored pencil, a quick sketch. Music notes curling into abstract shapes in a sapphire sky. He can’t see more than one corner of it around the computer, but he knows his own work.   
  
Sebastian kept the sketch. Keeps it here, where he performs his acts of award-winning creation.   
  
Sebastian blushes again. “I’m best with a piano but there’s no substitute for experience with any instrument’s actual voice—”   
  
“You’re incredible,” Chris announces, meaning it. Sebastian glances at his face, seems to be about to speak, and then hesitates, nibbles at his bottom lip, and changes the reply to, “Thank you, Chris. Here, bathroom, bedroom—”   
  
Chris would give a fortune, two fortunes, to know what that unspoken answer would’ve been. But he asked Sebastian to be honest, and Sebastian _has_ spoken up about wants, at least as regards the collar; this might only genuinely be his husband thinking twice about initial reactions, the same way anyone might, and Chris is afraid to push. They don’t know each other, not that well. Not yet.   
  
The bathroom’s essentially a box with a showerhead and a sink and a toilet. Sebastian makes an apologetic expression and observes that the architects had to save space somewhere, and anyway he doesn’t need much, he never has. Chris nods, and makes a mental note that whatever place they move into _has_ to have a shower that’ll fit both of them at once, and if possible an ocean-sized bathtub and bubbling jets and dual showerheads. Sebastian deserves that experience.    
  
And Chris, rather selfishly, wants to join him in a shower. Wants to look at his husband, his submissive, all steam-flushed and water-splashed and naked; sex might be an option, hopefully will be an option, but mostly Chris finds himself just wanting to hold Sebastian under the rainfall drops and massage shampoo through his hair and kiss the inviting spot at the nape of his neck.   
  
So his fantasies’re kind of pathetically domestic. They’re _his_. No one else has to know. Except, ideally, Sebastian at some point.    
  
He watches Sebastian out of the corner of his eye as one musician’s hand opens the door to the bedroom. Sebastian likes being warm. Likes being held. Chris can do that. Chris very decidedly would like to do that. For him.   
  
Sebastian waves at the bedroom, presumably indicating the entire area in one sweep. It has the same wide windows and inviting light as the living room, and a few more bookshelves, but is otherwise occupied by the bed, which takes up ninety percent of the space and is color-coordinated with the sofa in shades of cream and black and deep blue, and Chris’s brain promptly shuts off at the vision of himself laying his submissive down over those sapphire sheets and kissing every inch of golden skin.   
  
“…Chris? Sir?”   
  
“Um. Yeah? Yes. No. I mean you can just use my name. I mean I like you saying my name. I mean—oh fuck me.”   
  
Those glimmering turquoise eyes now look faintly amused. “Would you like that? Because I don’t have much experience in that area, but I’m not opposed to the concept if you order me to.”   
  
“…holy fuck,” Chris manages weakly, after five seconds during which he’s certain he’s going to combust on the spot. “You—I—you—yes, oh God yes, sometime yes. Not, um, now. We can—talk about it. You—that _was_ a joke. You’re joking. Oh God.”   
  
“I am, but I also meant it.” Sebastian throws him a smile. Chris wants to beg for more smiles, every day, just like that one. “I like…being yours. But if that’s what you want, then…I could be happy to serve you, Chris.”   
  
“I honestly don’t know,” Chris admits after a second, “whether I want you to never say that again or say that, like, _forever_.” He honestly doesn’t.   
  
Sebastian laughs. And tugs him back in the direction of the living room and kitchen. “I am not sure about you, but I could use sustenance. We didn’t have breakfast. And some of us haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday.”   
  
“Oh—” Chris stops. This, because they’re still holding hands, makes Sebastian stop too, inquiring eyebrows wordlessly going up. Chris reels him back in, all that enticing wary-cheetah sweetness, and nudges, “ _Are_ you okay?”   
  
Sebastian does that not-quite-smile again—Chris’s heart flutters—and then leans in to kiss him, swift as hummingbird wings. “Yes. Now. Come along and let me feed you. I’m entirely certain we talked about that.”   
  
“Yeah, and we said you didn’t have to.”   
  
“Yeah,” Sebastian purrs back, purposefully casual, holding his hand. “I want to.” Chris forgets words all over again. Pure amazement.   
  
Well. Not entirely pure. Not with that amount of accompanying lust.   
  
He holds onto that hand for as long as he can, until Sebastian takes it absentmindedly away to open the refrigerator. “Hmm.”   
  
“Want help?”   
  
“Jell-O related calamities, you said. No. Go sit down, Chris.”   
  
Chris blinks, laughs, trips over his own amusement. This is Sebastian being himself, kind and competent and very good at remembering Chris’s embarrassing stories; this is Sebastian being himself in his own home, where Chris is the outsider. The intruder.   
  
Sebastian had never _wanted_ to be contracted. Not to anyone.   
  
So he doesn’t want to cry, he goes back to glancing around.   
  
Sebastian’s baby grand piano shimmers like dark serene melody in the left corner behind the couch. It’s no doubt the most expensive bit of furniture in the place, and it knows as much, though not in a smug way. It’s probably just proud to be played by those elegant fingers, Chris decides.   
  
The bookshelves’re also dark wood, framing calm forests of titles and spines. Or they might be calm if they weren’t glaring protectively his direction; they know he doesn’t belong. Chris wouldn’t call himself _not_ a reader; he does read, at least as much as the average person, maybe more than some. Tends to gravitate toward non-fiction, philosophy, wilderness survival stories, science magazines. Kerouac and Buddhism. London and Hawking.    
  
Sebastian possesses some Stephen Hawking as well. Chris would feel hope about this convergence of interests, except Sebastian possesses a plethora of books, a multitude of books, vast and vibrant and joyously cacophonous in genre. Nineteen-fifties science-fiction paperbacks, optimistic shiny spaceship covers and men brandishing ray guns. Heinlein and Asimov and Carl Sagan side by side with Stanislaw Lem and Karel Čapek and Octavia Butler, plus a few others that Chris doesn’t know. Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard plays. A folklore and mythology section, and he wonders whether the story Sebastian’d told him had come from one of those volumes and if he could find it sometime. Bound opera scores on another shelf. A biography of Mozart sitting beside one of Gene Roddenberry.   
  
The books and their shelves are giving him the benefit of the doubt because Sebastian brought him home, but they don’t trust him an inch. Chris has the momentary impulse to throw himself at their feet and beg for the chance to prove his worth.   
  
“How do you feel about apple and cheddar?”   
  
“Sorry? I mean—sorry, I was. Um.” Feeling guilty in the direction of your bookshelves. No. “You have a lot of books.” He resists the urge to smack himself in the face. Sebastian _knows_ he has a lot of books. Sebastian _bought_ the books. Good _God_ , Chris. “Like sandwiches? Or, um, anything’s fine. Really.”   
  
“Well—sorry, I don’t believe I’ve got anything more carnivorous…” Sebastian looks around the kitchen as if meat might unexpectedly materialize from empty air. “Is this all right? For now?”   
  
“You don’t have to feed me.” Chris comes helplessly back into the kitchen. Language is failing him. No sounds for the hollowness under his skin, in his chest. It’s growing. Books and elegance and autumn-flavored sandwiches, while he’s got a lingering tower of pizza-boxes and beer-bottles at his place in Boston from the last party. The insidious vines of anguish hook themselves into his heart.   
  
“But,” Sebastian starts, confusion evident in the mountain pools. Chris, aware that this is his fault too, catches one long-fingered hand mid-gesture. “This is your place, and you—you don’t have to. You’re already letting me stay.”   
  
Sebastian looks at their hands. At Chris’s fingers, wrapped around his. “You and I both know that’s—that’s not true. Sir. But…as it happens…at the moment I am hungry. And it’s as easy to make two sandwiches as one. Either open the cheddar or hand it to me.”   
  
Chris opens the cheddar. Tries to regain equilibrium. “ _Are_ you vegetarian?” He’s not, not at all, but they can work around that if need be. He is, however, startled; he’s never heard even a whisper of that in any of the fan communities and blogs he might on occasion happen to wander by.   
  
“No. Not in the slightest. Buy me a burger sometime.” Sebastian’s capable fingers’re occupied with the transformation of round ripe apples into thin delicate slices. Chris gazes, mesmerized by the art. “I only haven’t been shopping. I do tend to forget things if I’m working. Like food. Or where I’ve put my phone. Is that enough?”   
  
“What? Oh. Whatever you think. Whatever you’d make for you?”   
  
Sebastian somehow manages to sigh, grin, and shake his head at once. Fondness, Chris thinks—hopes—and some exasperation. “I believe you have a fundamental misunderstanding of this particular dynamic, sir. And I thought I was the inexperienced one.”   
  
“Hey,” Chris says, taking his cue from that tone, taking cautious steps ahead, “I have experience. I have a _lot_ of experience. I can _show_ you experience.”   
  
Sebastian raises eyebrows, and murmurs to the cheddar, “And he asks me what _I_ think we should do…”   
  
“Yeah,” Chris says before the block of cheese can chime in, “because I want to know, because I want to make you happy,” and then his brain catches up and kicks him in the head but the words’re already spinning in the air.   
  
Sebastian taps fingers over his kitchen knife. One-two-three. The sound’s not loud, but loud enough, in the pause.   
  
Sebastian looks up. With a spare slice of cheddar held out in Chris’s direction. “I remain unconvinced that you in fact know how this relationship works, but I would hardly protest being made happy. Particularly if that involves chocolate cheesecake.”   
  
“Noted.” When he takes the offering—and ends up breathless at the brush of their fingers—he gets another smile. The flavors burst across his taste-buds: sharp, firm, creamy. Dizzy with sensation and that smile, he adds, “Is that the reason you love New York? Cheesecake? It totally is, right?” and Sebastian’s fingers’re amused, handing him a completed plate. “Precisely. Not the museums, or the music scene…”   
  
“Nope. Desserts.”   
  
“Brownie tiramisu, blackberry truffle cake, chocolate egg creams…I do of course have a gym membership. Is yours all right, or does it need more of anything? I could find the appropriate mustard again.”   
  
“There’s _in_ appropriate mustard?” At which point Chris’s brain permanently gives up, because attempts at control of his mouth are futile. “Also this is brilliant. Don’t touch it. You’re a god. Of sandwiches.”   
  
“Apparently deification has a low bar of entry.” Sebastian props elbows on the counter, taking bites. Chris nearly says something—he’s not exactly happy with that line of self-deprecating humor—but Sebastian adds, licking a fingertip, “and I imagine inappropriate mustard would make poorly phrased comments about the firmness of the apples,” and Chris falls in love all over again.    
  
Head over heels. The sweet crispness of apples and sunlight on his back from the open window and Sebastian picking up and running with his terrible jokes. Just like that. Incontrovertible.   
  
He puts half his sandwich in his mouth, because it’ll give him time to think of words that aren’t _I want to lick the apple juice off your fingers and maybe other places if you’ll let me_. Sebastian regards this maneuver with some astonishment, but evidently decides it’s not worth more than raised-eyebrow commentary and goes back to eating.   
  
Chris chews away at his too-ambitious bite. Watches his submissive. His husband. The man he’s in love with. He’d begun a mental list, on the way over: blueberries, chocolate, music, folklore, the utterly incandescent sex they’d managed to have despite the circumstances. Those are things he’s pretty sure Sebastian likes. He can do those things.    
  
Maybe Sebastian won’t fall in love with him in return—and why would he, why would all that extraordinary complicated brilliance want a paint-splattered fanboy artist who likes beer and pick-up basketball and hiking—but Chris has made him smile. Somehow. With stupid jokes about mustard.   
  
He watches Sebastian here at home, here in the home he’s going to lose because of Chris, and the words that come out have to be, “I’m sorry.”   
  
Sebastian sets down the last bite of his sandwich. “For what?”   
  
For everything. For everything I have to ask of you. For asking it anyway. For not quite being able to regret that this happened even though I know you must, I know I’m so damn lucky you don’t hate me, I love you. “For…what I said. This morning. When we—when you were—about what you knew, what you didn’t know, and I told you not to talk, but I said you should tell me if you were confused, and you were trying to, and I’m sorry.”   
  
“…oh.” Sebastian studies his plate, not Chris’s face. Taps at the sliver of bread with one finger, nudging it into a straight and tidy horizontal line. “That. Yes. I’m not angry at you.”   
  
“You ought to be.” His stomach twists into a knot, hearing those words. Sebastian should be angry, and isn’t, and that…whatever that means, he’s scared it’s not healthy. “I was wrong. You can tell me when I’m wrong—wait, you know that, right? You can. I want you to.”   
  
“You were attempting to learn what I knew.” Sebastian pokes at the crust again, even though from Chris’s perspective it seems perfectly aligned. “I know why you did it. If we’re in public, if it’s visible to everyone, I can’t stop and question you. You were testing whether I knew that. Whether I would obey you without difficulty, if we’re in that…atmosphere? That’s not the word. Mindset, maybe. That’s not right either. English, _plimba ursu_ , such a terrible language… But you get the idea. You were testing my responses, and I know enough to know I should’ve waited for permission to speak, at least when we’re being formal, even if you’re not enforcing that at home. Sir. Chris. Sorry.”   
  
This explanation sounds far more rational and articulate than Chris recalls being at that moment. He’s not sure whether Sebastian genuinely believes it or is being kind. Either version is more generous than he deserves.    
  
“You should still be angry,” he settles on finally. “Because even if you thought…if we were being formal, I didn’t say so. We didn’t have an audience. And I did tell you to ask questions if you had them. So, yeah, be mad at me, I deserve it.”   
  
Sebastian tips his head to one side, sparrow-like and considering. “Would it change anything if I were? I was…surprised, at the time. But I was also…and you know this, you were there…the edge of that feeling, like…clouds, like flying, like the flawless note that never ends…you did surprise me. But I trusted you. I trust you. I assumed you knew more about this than I did, and so if you said something was wrong I’d listen. Which makes me sound far too coherent. I did say flying.”   
  
“You don’t like airplanes,” Chris says. The afternoon sunlight drops behind a cloud, hurting too.   
  
“No,” Sebastian says, and catches his gaze, and holds it. “I’m not good at…take-offs and landings. But I don’t mind being in the air.”   
  
“I said…if you want, I could hold your hand…?”   
  
“Yes. You can. How much further are we planning to push this poor tormented metaphor today?”   
  
“Maybe just a little more?” Chris lifts a hand, palm up, over the countertops. Sebastian takes it without any visible reluctance. The sunlight peeks out anew. “I’m still sort of figuring out the controls, no guarantees about turbulence, but I promise to try to get you down safe?”   
  
“I am having tremendous difficulty refraining from the obvious joke about cockpits, you understand.” Sebastian’s thumb rubs gently across the back of his hand. “Also thank you. _Mulţumesc._ ”   
  
“Make the joke,” Chris begs. “Please. Please make all the jokes. Come on, I said the thing about the mustard, it’s your turn, you know you want to.”   
  
“I am practicing restraint.” And mountain-lake eyes widen innocently at him on the last word. “Isn’t that what good submissives do? Practice…restraints? Or am I saying that incorrectly, in English?”   
  
Chris stares, puts his free hand melodramatically on the countertop for support, and announces, “Dead. Spontaneous combustion. No recovery,” and inside is turning cartwheels and jumping up and down with amazed glee. Sebastian’s making jokes about this. About restraints.    
  
He’d said brilliant, earlier. Sebastian _is_.   
  
That is a reminder, though. He’d also said they needed to talk, and they do. He’s already been a less than responsible Dominant, not counting the wedding night—that operates under more archaic and distressingly aphrodisiac rules—but on the morning after, when he’d let Sebastian get on both knees and offer himself outside the shower. When he’d left Sebastian tied to the bed, when they’d jumped into said bed with little more than instinct as a guide.    
  
If they’re doing this properly, then before they do anything else they need to go through more than just the hasty three rules he’d put in place the previous night. Those are important, and he’ll reinforce them—be honest, be present, be good when given direct orders—but other conversations need to be had. Hard and soft limits. Safewords if Sebastian wants anything other than standard red, yellow, green. Past experience.   
  
Past experience. He hears that modern-day-enchantment voice admit again, in memory: I thought I needed it to hurt…   
  
Sebastian’s looking at him curiously. “I assumed that was only teasing, about the instantaneous lack of vitality…”   
  
“Yeah—no! I mean I’m fine. Sorry. I was thinking…I’m a fuckin’ moron, actually, is what I’m thinking. I told you we needed to go over things. Checklists. I don’t have them. On me. Here.”   
  
“Checklists…ah. You need to know what I’ve done, and what I’ve not tried.”   
  
“We,” Chris corrects, standing close to him in the sunlit world of the kitchen, hyperaware of every element of stone countertops and autumnal sweetness and the presence of those musician’s fingers in his. “You need to know too. About me. We don’t have to do this now if you don’t feel like it, but—but I’m sorry again, I forgot, I should’ve been prepared, so that we could—”   
  
“Go over limits, before I ask you to tie me up a second time?” No censure in that voice, or if so only self-mocking, and gently. “Do you have them someplace online? Send me the link? I do own a printer.”   
  
“Um,” Chris says, because Sebastian’s clearly capable of taking a potentially problematic hiccup and resolving it calmly while Chris’s idiot brain spins off into failure and anxiety. “Yeah, I emailed them to myself so I wouldn’t forget, and then I forgot—”   
  
“If you apologize once more I shall never make godlike sandwiches for you in the future.” Sebastian hands over his own mobile phone. “Send them to me. And give me your number.”   
  
Chris, rather bemused by the orders and the threat—an effective one even if he’s ninety percent sure his submissive doesn’t mean it—does as commanded. A few seconds later his own phone chirps; Sebastian says, “Now you have my number, too, and I’ll be right back,” and vanishes off to his office.   
  
Chris, left alone with his phone and Sebastian’s number and the meaningful stares of the bookshelves, kind of wants to laugh. If he did it’d be a bittersweet kind of laugh. Sebastian can take care of himself. Sebastian can take care of _him_.    
  
He’s pathetically grateful and surprised enough that the incipient anxiety’s cut off at the knees. He’s also partly turned on and partly afraid: the competence has kicked his heart-rate up a notch, but that same competence will get them into trouble if displayed too publicly.   
  
Sebastian’s _his_. His submissive. Sebastian needs this marriage to work. Chris _wants_ this marriage to work.    
  
Sebastian put his number into Chris’s phone. Had no qualms about handing Chris his own.   
  
Sebastian reemerges, brandishing paper and pens. “Here. Purple glitter ink?”   
  
“…um.” Whatever Sebastian feels like handing him. Anything. “Sure?”   
  
“Only joking. Navy blue. Appropriately serious. Shall we, then?”   
  
Chris stares at the not-purple and non-glittery pen, and manages, “Yeah…”   
  
“I’ll be quick.” Sebastian curls up on the sofa, unearthing a writing desk from a sheaf of notebooks, flipping his own pen absently through fingers. The sunshine plays indolently with the edges of his hair.   
  
“Wait,” Chris says, and gets up. “You didn’t—did you want the end of your sandwich?”   
  
“Oh…I forgot. I—oh, you’re bringing it over…”   
  
Chris, leaning over the back of the couch, holds out the last bite of bread and cheese. In front of Sebastian’s lips. Somehow that feels natural. The right thing to do. “Finish your sandwich.”   
  
Sebastian’s eyes get wider, and his lips part, and then he leans forward and nibbles the bite neatly out of Chris’s fingertips.   
  
The sunbeam dances with giddiness.   
  
“Right,” Chris says, barely audible, word just another piece of the moment. Sebastian kisses his fingers, more of a breath than a touch, exhale a murmur over Chris’s skin.   
  
The pen slips free of Sebastian’s lax other hand and flops onto the floor, knocking into the coffee table along the way for good measure.   
  
Sebastian blinks, blushes intensely, and dives for the security of paper. “You asked me to…checklists…sorry, Chris…”   
  
“No,” Chris says, “I liked that,” and Sebastian, through the blush and not looking up, admits, “I think I might’ve liked it too, sir.”   
  
“Yeah,” Chris agrees, “I kinda thought you maybe did, so go fill yours out and I’ll do mine and after we go over them maybe I can feed you another apple, if you’re good, or just ’cause it’s fun?” Sebastian, ears pink, nods.   
  
And Chris has to smile. He’s still the interloper here, the never-wanted part of Sebastian’s life. But Sebastian does want him. And even the bookshelves thaw and unbend in his direction.   
  
It’s a pretty standard checklist, detailed and thorough and businesslike; he knows his answers pretty well, and gets through it fast. He’s not done anything too exotic—he’s willing to try, of course, and he’s starting to suspect that he’d quite like to experiment with Sebastian, now that Sebastian’s his. But he’s mostly previously relied on big hands and strength and emotional connection with partners; he’s never played with anyone who wasn’t a friend first, and he thinks very briefly of Matt’s laughing eyes and a too-loose set of cheap handcuffs and cheerful improvisation, and then he stops thinking about that and checks off _restraints_ as something he’s both experienced with using and likes on his sub.   
  
No to blood and marks and permanent scars. No to inviting other people to play. He’s not sharing Sebastian. He wouldn’t, not ever, but he’s fairly sure Sebastian’s still a little nervous about the fact that it’s technically within Chris’s rights to pull him out as a party favor. Hopefully this’ll help; it’s not a legal document in the sense that their marriage contract is, but Chris plans to treat it as one.   
  
No to certain bodily-waste related kinks. That’s not an idea he can wrap his head around, and he seriously hopes Sebastian isn’t into those. Though…he stares at the paper for a second…Sebastian waiting to get up, until given permission…Sebastian giving over that much control of his own body, desperate and beautiful and squirming, begging Chris to let him find a toilet and relief….Sebastian on his knees, Sebastian letting Chris claim him, an act of marking territory, possessiveness…maybe only in the shower, where they _can_ shower after…   
  
Dammit. He changes that particular answer to ‘never tried but maybe interested in the future’. Crosses his legs and flips a glance at the other end of the sofa. Sebastian’s checking a box, fingers neat and tidy, eyes absorbed. Chris’s erection decides that Sebastian being serious and studious is the most erotic sight in the universe, and gets even more insistent.   
  
A few of the items on the list he’s never heard of. He probably ought to. Being Sebastian’s Dominant and all. Being responsible.    
  
Ha. Sebastian’s already saved him in more ways than he can count, and that’s just today.   
  
He gives up and circles a few lines and scribbles next to those, _I don’t even fucking know what these are, I’m sorry, I’ll learn if you want?_ and offers, “Done?”   
  
“Ah…yes. More or less.” Sebastian looks up. “Can I ask you a question?”   
  
“Of course!”   
  
“This…the last three things…I don’t know what those are.”   
  
“Oh thank God,” Chris says, and then has to explain his relieved laughter, but by the end Sebastian’s smiling too. “I feel far better about this, in that case, sir…Chris, sorry…here, do you want mine? I’ll just leave those blank.”   
  
“I do like you using my name.”   
  
“Chris.”   
  
“ _Just_ like that. Okay, here…” They trade. Sebastian stretches one long leg out and drapes it over the arm of the couch, plainly unthinking, getting comfortable with his furniture. Chris openly stares. He’s allowed.   
  
The room feels warmer. Not the fault of the sunshine. He crosses his legs again. Focuses. Reading. Right.   
  
He looks at the checklist. And then looks again. Huh. Just—huh.   
  
Sebastian has far more items checked than he’d’ve guessed. Granted, most of those’re in the ‘tried once’ category, with variations on ‘liked, didn’t like, would try again,’ but still. Experience with various toys, with hair-pulling, with bondage, with, God, _canes_ , and his brain helpfully presents him with the image of red lines striping the pale gold of slim thighs, indelible reminders of belonging every time Sebastian sits or stands.    
  
He glances over at his sub, across the paper. Sebastian appears to be occupied in reading Chris’s responses. Not glancing back.   
  
Sebastian’s done more than Chris ever has, and more adventurously. This is becoming increasingly undeniable with every line, and new sparks of worry bloom in his gut, behind his heart, at the back of his mind. What if he’s _not_ good enough? What if Sebastian’s expecting more? What if, what if.   
  
To avoid the possible examination of that _what if_ , he reads a bit further. And his brain goes from _huh, interesting, we could try that_ to _what the everloving fuck_ in record time. “You—you—this—knives—blood—”   
  
Sebastian looks up. His expression’s unreadable, though Chris catches a flicker of—something—before those gates swing shut. “That was my third night out. Third club. Six years ago. Standard stipulations of no scars and no permanent injuries. Please note that I said I’m willing to try again.”   
  
“What—” Chris can’t find oxygen. No air left in the world. “You—you let someone—cut you, and that’s not a no—” His gaze flicks back over the list. “You _didn’t_ say no. Not to—not to _anything_ —”   
  
Sebastian looks off-balance for the first time in the current conversation. “I can’t—I don’t have the right to—if you want—”   
  
“No,” Chris says, heart crumpling in his chest. “No. Listen. Please.” Because aquamarine eyes seem shaken, turbulence in the depths, he scoots over to that side of the couch and holds out both hands. After a second, Sebastian takes them.   
  
“We’re going to throw this seriously out,” Chris tells him, jerking his head back at the paper he’s left crushed on his side, “and you’re going to do it again, okay? Be honest with me. Tell me what you like and don’t like and whatever your limits are, whatever you don’t want to do again or even try, please, please, I need to know. I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do. Do you understand that? Do you—I can say it in other languages, French at least, or you can teach me Romanian, if you want, and I’ll try?”   
  
Sebastian looks at his face. At his eyes. Gradually starts to smile. “Yes, Chris.”   
  
“Yes, you understand, or yes, you want me to try, or yes, you agree and you’re gonna tell me what you like and don’t like?”   
  
“Yes to the first and last. Possibly to the second at some point.” Sebastian looks at their joined hands. “I thought…I don’t know what I thought. That you’d be different. I don’t know how to do this. How to be good for you.”   
  
“I don’t want you to be good for me,” Chris pleads, and then stops, because that’s not one hundred percent true, not with the shameful secret quiver scampering along his veins with those words. Honesty. He’s promised that.    
  
He says, “I want you to want to be good for me, but not because you think it’s what I want, I want you to be you, I want you to want to—oh, hell, this isn’t making any sense at all, is it. I’m sorry. I’m just—I’m not fuckin’ good at this. I’m sorry.”   
  
“I think you’re not bad at this, in fact.” Sebastian’s smile’s crooked and hopeful. “I am not…good at this either. Obviously. If it helps, I did mean it about that one. I told you I like the hurt, the intensity, sometimes. I thought I needed that, I did tell you, to fall under. And that was so overwhelming, that one, putting so much trust in his hands…I was terrified and I knew I was tied down and completely at his mercy and I needed that so badly, and I did get off, I won’t say I didn’t. I would try again with you if you asked for that. But I was scared, and I don’t know whether I liked it. I honestly don’t.”   
  
Chris’s heart splinters and reforms. All in the course of a single speech. He’s not sure which is more painful. He runs fingers over the backs of Sebastian’s hands, words clogged in his throat. He’s only capable of sensation. Of taking in every dip and sway of bone and tendon and articulate joint.   
  
Sebastian turns one hand. Curls fingers around his. “I’m sorry, Chris. I’m trying.”   
  
“Don’t,” Chris whispers. “Don’t—be sorry, don’t be anything, just—I know you didn’t want this. You didn’t want me.”   
  
And those expressive fingers tighten in astonishment. “But I do. Want you.”   
  
“You…what?”   
  
“I do want you.” Sebastian leans down and kisses Chris’s fingers where they’re entwined with his. Chris can’t see his eyes, but can in the next second, when his submissive sits back up and shakes nosy stray strands of hair away. “I picked you. I chose you. You were—you were the only one who seemed to want me. So many suitors wrote to my mother, sent cards, mentioned how fortunate they’d be to have such a talented submissive, even promised they’d let me continue to compose, as if that were a great favor… You wrote to me. You came to one of my performances. You made a piece of art for us. I wanted you.”   
  
“Oh,” Chris says, but no sound comes out. Butterflies in his gut, swooping dizzily. Crashing into his newly-repaired heart. “Oh.”   
  
“I’ll do it again,” Sebastian says. “But…it wasn’t all me answering the way I thought you’d like. Some, yes. But I’d trust you with the rest. Hot wax and ice cubes included.”   
  
“You…would?”   
  
“You care whether I eat.” As if that’s an answer. Maybe it is. The butterflies swoop some more, caught between exhilaration and terror. Sebastian adds, tone self-directedly dry, “I realize I’ve just said that to someone I’ve known for far too few hours…”   
  
I love you, Chris doesn’t say. Not the time. Not with that reminder. I love you, you and your music and your pretending to hand me a purple glitter pen as you smile. No. He gets out, fumbling as newborn steps, “I wanted you, too…I like feeding you…I _want_ you. I want _you_. I couldn’t believe you said yes.”   
  
“Neither could I.” Sebastian sighs, squeezes Chris’s hands, shrugs as much as possible without moving. “I mean in general. The whole situation. Real, once I said it. Sometimes I thought it had to be a bad dream. But then there was you.”   
  
“And…that…was still a bad dream?”   
  
“Oh, hardly. I’m not certain what type of dream it is now. Confusing. Or that’s being awake. I never knew I could want to kneel at your feet in my own apartment.”   
  
Chris sits bolt upright and asks, “What? And also, I’m gonna say it again, what?”   
  
“I don’t even _know_.” Sebastian sounds disgruntled by this. “It is an inexplicable urge. And I am not going to attempt to explain. Certainly not in English.”   
  
“But you want to.”   
  
This earns a glare; Chris thinks of aggravated half-grown cheetah kittens, long legs and lashing tails. The aggravation’s not as much directed at him, he thinks, as it is at the inexplicability. “So,” he tries, cautious and curious, “if you wanted to do that, while you fill this out again…sitting at my feet…”   
  
“My coffee table is in the way,” Sebastian says, though this comes out as less a protest and more a registration of continued annoyance. Chris considers this for a handful of seconds. “Sebastian?”   
  
“Yes?”   
  
“Go print a new version. I’ll move your furniture. And you’ll sit at my feet while you fill it out. Clear?”   
  
He gets the satisfaction of actually seeing his submissive’s mouth fall open, at that.    
  
He turns a hand. Taps fingers over Sebastian’s wrist. Mutters under his breath, knowing he’ll be heard, “Please say yes…”   
  
And the sun comes up behind those blue eyes. Sunset approaching outside; dawn indoors, in pale blue. Open skies. “Yes, Chris.”   
  
“Go on, then.” He lifts hands away. Makes a shooing gesture toward the office. Sebastian doesn’t snort out loud, possibly because it’s undignified or just because he’s unwilling to roll eyes at his Dominant, but instead unfurls a positively wicked smile and slides to his feet in a sinuous motion that makes Chris choke on nothing at all. His submissive’s apparently very good at revenge.   
  
Sebastian grins, and goes.

 

_ Sebastian _   
  
In the solitude of his office, Sebastian shuts the door and then, for good measure, leans back against it. After a second, very slowly, tips his head back into the cool wood too. It holds him up supportively in at least two ways.   
  
Chris Evans. Good _God_.   
  
He’d said he’d never known. True. He’d never even _imagined_.   
  
He stares at his desk. At the printer. Checklists. Honesty. Chris wanting him on his knees—after Sebastian’d admitted to wanting to be there.    
  
He wonders a little hysterically if it’s too late to have the panic attack after all, and then forgets to breathe for a while, and then remembers how. The door’s solid and thick and clearly defined at his back. His door. His office. The instruments and recorders and mixing boards gaze at him with compassion.    
  
His wrist tingles where Chris’s fingers tapped.    
  
Chris wanted him. Wants him. Looks at him as if he’s beautiful; looks at him with thoroughgoing delight when Sebastian gingerly teases him about pens and sandwiches. Worried about him not telling the truth on a checklist, and asked him to do it again.   
  
I’m scared, he remembers thinking, remembers saying. Of what I don’t know. Who am I, if I’m not the same person I was before I knew this?   
  
Chris talked about wanting him. Not wanting to change him. But change is inevitable, change _happens_ when life gets flipped upside down, and he’s already different from the person he’d been before his wedding day. He shuts his eyes. Plays notes in his head. Chopin. Mozart. Billy Idol, with all attendant irony. A nice day for a white wedding. Hell.   
  
His fingers want, against all reason and rationality, to write a love song. The smile in Chris’s eyes. The promise to feed him. The promise that he can say no and be heard.   
  
Chris doesn’t have the experience that Sebastian does, or not precisely. He’s understood that much from looking at Chris’s answers. Chris has probably only played lightly, lovingly, afraid to push or to draw blood physical or emotional. Chris _had_ someone he’d loved, and lost. And Sebastian’s standing here with memories of impersonal scattered club-night leather floggers and rope-knots and gags, wanting Chris to love him.   
  
He swallows. It hurts.    
  
He is afraid. He’s afraid he’s beginning to be in love with Chris Evans, with kind hands and a well-meaning heart and eyes that get anxious over the barest possibility of letting someone down.   
  
And he wants to walk back out and curl up at Chris’s feet and lean against muscular legs with Chris’s hand in his hair.   
  
He laughs once, briefly, at his own ridiculousness. And shoves himself away from the door and prints one more copy of that checklist and takes a deep breath and takes steps down the hall.   
  
Chris looks up when he comes in. The world teeters momentarily, and then finds balance, even better than before.    
  
The table’s been nudged to one side, destroying the symmetry of the room, and Chris has kicked off shoes and socks and considerately put them back over by the door as if Sebastian might actually care about tidiness, and those worried-ocean eyes sweep over him, up and down, and Sebastian catches his own mouth creaking into a smile.   
  
Before he can start thinking, he makes his way across the room and drops to his knees at Chris’s feet and then doesn’t look up because that’s too much right now.   
  
“Hey,” Chris says, very softly, “however you’re comfortable, okay, I’m not saying you have to kneel, hell, you can get back on the couch if you want,” and Sebastian glances up and Chris’s gaze lands on his face like a kiss.   
  
It’s an anchor. Intimate. Unassailable.   
  
In the background, the lowering sun sends last-ditch sparkles into the sky. Light glints from buildings, skyscrapers, automobile rooftops. New York City, turning from opulent day to secret glittering night.   
  
He adjusts his weight so he’s not exactly kneeling properly, legs folded a little to one side, and props a shoulder against Chris’s left leg. Then, for no real reason beyond the impulse, wraps a hand around Chris’s ankle, holding on.   
  
Chris breathes out, a small astounded exhale, and fingers touch his hair, his cheek, lightly asking. Sebastian tilts his head into the caress. Being petted, again; well, they do both like that, he thinks, and the thought’s somewhat unfocused. Drifting. Hazy and pleasurable.   
  
Chris did ask him to do something; he murmurs, “Pen?” and Chris’s fingers pause and Chris’s other hand discovers and offers the writing utensil. “Want your lap-desk?”   
  
“Yes, please,” Sebastian agrees—he could’ve just used a knee, he’s done it before, but he feels like saying yes. And he ticks off more yes in little boxes and the occasional no because Chris did say to be honest, with Chris’s hand in his hair.   
  
Chris regards the new version thoughtfully when he’s done. “Do you want to get up?”   
  
“Mmm…no. Unless you want me to.”   
  
“Not yet, then.” Chris trails fingers over the back of his neck. Sebastian shivers as the sensation reverberates throughout his body, igniting hidden bonfires deep inside. Chris grins—audible in that voice, happiness ringing like bells along a Colonial-history lane—and does it again. “So…there are things you don’t like, after all. No blindfolds?”   
  
“I’ve tried. I don’t…I’m not good with…” There’s no easy way to explain. Not a phobia as such. He can try again. It’s only the lingering chill of long-ago secret-police bogeyman whispers, interrogation rumors heard as a child that’ve snuck their way into the irrational deepseated home of dreams and dread. “I’ll be okay with it if you want that. I’ve done it before.”    
  
He’d cried, that time, but he doesn’t mention that. The nameless woman he’d been with had wrung the orgasm out of him anyway, release for both him and her, and then apologized and brought him water and rubbed his back. Afterward, slipping away, he’d overheard her complaining to a friend about subs who got too emotional in a casual scene.   
  
Chris looks at him levelly for a few seconds longer than feels comfortable. “No blindfolds. No sensory deprivation of _any_ fuckin’ type. Is that okay?”   
  
“ _Da_. Yes. I—thank you.”   
  
Chris continues scrutinizing his expression. “I mean it. Nothing you don’t like. Tell me you know I mean it.”   
  
“I…think so. Yes. You mean it.”   
  
“Okay, then. Also you can’t say no on paper and then turn it into a yes if we’re talking. Even if you think I want the yes.”   
  
“You do. You checked yes to—”   
  
“Sebastian.” Chris’s voice, while not angry, cracks through his sentence like a whip. Sebastian snaps his mouth shut. Feels blood drain from his face. He’s made his Dominant displeased with him. Well, he thinks distantly, it was only a matter of time; he doesn’t know how to do this, doesn’t know how to be good, and—   
  
“Hey.” Chris sounds concerned. Apprehension in the cobbled streets. In the way big hands grip frozen shoulders. Chris has to lean down to touch him more securely. “Sebastian. Look at me. I’m not upset, I’m not mad at you—okay, maybe a little, but not for arguing with me, I don’t care if—I don’t want you to change your answers because they’re not the same as mine. I don’t want to try something and find out later that you hated it. I want this to be good for us both, got it?”   
  
“But,” Sebastian says, because clearly his mouth’s disconnected itself from his brain, “you don’t have to. If there’s something you like—”   
  
“If there’s something I like and you don’t, we’ll talk about it, but we won’t try anything you’re not comfortable with, and you looked pretty fuckin’ uncomfortable just now.” Chris shakes him slightly, very gently. “I don’t have any major attachment to blindfolds or earplugs or any of that, I don’t _care_ about this one, okay? Look at me, please?”   
  
“Trying…you’re serious…you won’t make me do that.”   
  
“Nope.” Chris touches his cheek, swipes a thumb under his left eye. “It’s okay, all right? Is there—did something—something you want to talk about, or…”   
  
“No…not yet. Memories. I don’t know.” With Chris’s hand cupping his face, he murmurs, “I’ve not had that nightmare in months,” and Chris’s eyes go wide in shock. “You have nightmares—?”   
  
“Not often. I’m sorry in advance if I wake you.” And, belatedly comprehending why Chris appears so horrified, “oh, _pula mea,_ no, it’s not about sex. Nothing—nothing like that. Never. I swear. I’m all right, Chris, I promise.”   
  
“You’re not,” Chris grumbles, “if you’re surprised at _not_ having nightmares,” but the touch to his cheek is gentle, exquisitely so. “You said not yet and I’m gonna respect that, so I’m just saying I would like to know but you don’t have to care about that and I’m here when or if you ever feel like telling me.”   
  
Sebastian closes his eyes, letting the words sink in. The words, and the touch, and the warmth of Chris’s body bent awkwardly down to reassure him. “I will. Sometime. Not today.”   
  
“No.” Chris’s fingers stroke his hair, back to soothing. “I looked at your other answers, I think we’re pretty close on everything else, but you might have to give me some input if you want me to try some of the heavier stuff, I don’t even own a paddle and I don’t know what a violet wand is. We’ll figure it out. Want back up on the couch?”   
  
Sebastian, after turning the idea over, nods. His legs’re shaky when he tries to unfold them. Chris has to help. “ _Mulţumesc_. Thank you.”   
  
“Still no to that,” Chris says, and gets them settled on the sofa, Sebastian’s head in his lap for ease of hair-petting and backrubs, or at least this seems to be the reason, given the immediate start of both. “Better?”   
  
“Yes…” A fraction of that feeling from earlier’s returning. The soft-focused languid sweetness that feels like puzzle-pieces gradually settling into place. Seems to be related to Chris arranging him in place. “I think I like you moving my furniture.”   
  
“What—oh.” Chris’s laugh’s tinged with relief. “Yeah, your coffee table kinda looks good there. Can we go shopping sometime? Pick up an actual kneeling cushion?”   
  
“Why are you asking? Shouldn’t you be informing me that we’re going out to buy me proper submissive’s furniture?” He waves a hand a few inches through the air. “And yes. If I’m going to be spending time on the floor.”   
  
“Only if you want. About both. I’ll make it an order if you’re telling me to. You’re coming with me to buy floor pads and whatever else we can think of, sub. I mean, whenever works for your schedule.”   
  
“Yes, Chris,” Sebastian says, and lets one leg dangle to the floor, sprawled out across his sofa in the dwindling violets and greys of city sundown with his Dominant’s fingers massaging his scalp.    
  
“You look happy,” Chris breathes, not stopping the massage. The apartment’s getting dimmer around them, but not dark yet. Opalescent and private. A secret shadowy world built just for two, and full of magic.   
  
“I believe…I am, yes.”   
  
“Good.” Chris looks down at him, smiling. “Good. Um…will you hate me if I say we should talk more? Safewords. Your schedule, and mine…expectations…”   
  
“Oh. No, go on. We should. As far as safewords, though…” He considers picking musical terms, faster and slower, but in the end opts for easy. “I’m fine with standard green-yellow-red if you are. I doubt I’d remember anything more complicated. If I think of anything better I’ll let you know.”   
  
“Sounds good to me.” Chris plays with his hair, idle and undemanding. “Schedules, then. So we both sort of work from home…we’ll need to find someplace with studio space for me and an office for you—oh, shit, sorry—”   
  
That wound’s already been inflicted and tentatively patched up. He can regard the bandage with dispassion. “It’s fine, sir.”   
  
“Not as convincing as you think you are. I’m pretty flexible unless I have an exhibit opening or something, but I like to get up and go for a run in the mornings and then come back and work. You have meetings, right? With directors and whatever?”   
  
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes online, but in person if we can. And I like to go in when an orchestra’s recording one of my scores.” Chris’s thigh’s warm and strong beneath his head. Chris makes an excellent pillow, he decides. If pillows could run fingers over the nape of his neck and make him weak-kneed while lying down. “Is that…all right? Will it be a problem?”   
  
“Shouldn’t be.” Chris rests a hand over his hip, thinking. “I’ll come in with you, at least the first few times. I know you can get around New York by yourself, but we need to be seen, y’know? I won’t stay if you’d rather I don’t, but I should at least drop you off and pick you up.”   
  
“Appearances…yes, all right.” That does matter. This contract has to be visible. Alleviating potential gossip about an improperly trained submissive. About a submissive allowed defiance and independence for thirty years. Chris has to demonstrate some amount of control.    
  
Also, a heretofore unknown bit of Sebastian’s heart chimes in, you like the idea of having him around.   
  
“I am not so much a morning person,” he adventures, in light of this optimism. Chris hasn’t forbidden him from working. The opposite, in fact. Sorting out schedules together. “Not early morning, at any rate. I tend to start around ten, and then…possibly not eat lunch…and stop when I have to find dinner, unless I don’t. I can get distracted when I’m composing. Or if rehearsals go late with an orchestra. And if you want routines I also go to the gym twice a week. Afternoons.”   
  
That’s going to have to change as well. Chris makes a noise that’s not quite a rumble of irritation. “Okay, actual rule number one. I expect you to eat. I don’t care when you take a lunch break, just that you do, so I’m gonna ask you when I see you for dinner, and I want you to tell me the truth. And also I’ll probably come with you to the gym once or twice, same reason as before.”   
  
“What if I forget? About the food.”   
  
Chris raises eyebrows. “Then I get to punish you, sub.”   
  
“…oh.”   
  
“You aren’t sure about that?”   
  
“I’ve never—what do you have in mind?” He’s too relaxed and lazy at the moment to feel cold, but he does regardless, in an abstract fashion. Chris could mean anything by that. Whips, cages, bruises…he did tell Chris he hates blindfolds, what if—   
  
“I don’t know yet,” Chris says thoughtfully. “But I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to spank you, ’cause you like that too much, but nothing you’ve said no to, either. Put you on your knees in the corner, maybe, and not touch you all night.”   
  
Sebastian hears himself whimper out loud. Shameless and pathetic, and that sounds terrible, like nothing he’d want to deserve; but it also sounds strangely right: Chris knows precisely what would work. Chris knows him that well, this soon.    
  
And it _would_ work, and he’d accept it, because—because it’d feel right.   
  
He very nearly whimpers again, at that conclusion. His cock stirs between his legs. Coiling arousal like melting gold, beginning to pool and ripple.   
  
The hand on his hip gets a fraction heavier. “Was that a good sound?”   
  
“What—oh. Both.”   
  
“Both? Oh. Got it.” Good _and_ unnerving; Chris is good at understanding. “Still okay?”   
  
“Yes. Are you, sir?”   
  
“Me…” Chris lets out an amused not-quite-laugh. “Scared as hell.”   
  
Sebastian studies him for a while in silence, at that admission. The fingers of night limn Chris’s eyelashes in indigo and velvet. Play symphonies along the bearded line of his jaw, the curve of his lips. Sketch hope into every eye-blink and lip-bite.   
  
Finally he says, “I think perhaps only half a hell, at the moment.” And Chris, startled, bursts out laughing. “Really?”   
  
“Fewer bloodsucking devils than before, at least. We’ve covered money and schedules and emergency contacts and…you punishing me…what else? Do you have other rules?”   
  
Chris starts to answer, stops, shakes his head. “That was about to be a really dumb question. I _know_ you’ve never done any long-term contracts. It’s gonna be a lot to get used to, and I don’t actually want to change your life around, anyway. Maybe one or two things, but…”   
  
“Tell me.” If his Dominant has expectations, rules, orders, he’d rather know now and not find himself in trouble later for something he’d unwittingly done wrong. He’s going to do enough wrong as it is, just by virtue of a lack of training and a tendency to get too complacent with Chris’s reformist sympathies and argue back.   
  
“Well…” Chris makes a face at the night. “We talked about me wanting to be able to touch you, that’s one. And there’s you eating properly, that’s two. Three…I know how it is when you’re working, believe me, I _know_ , but if I call you or if I need to see you, please at least answer your phone. You can tell me to wait, but I need you to—I get nervous if people I—care about—don’t pick up.”   
  
That one might be tricky—Sebastian has been known to frequently lose his phone in a stack of script pages and notes about character-related melodies—but he can hear the catch and skip in the words, and he knows a portion of that story now, and so when he says “Yes, Chris” he means that he knows why it’s important and he’ll try.   
  
“Okay. Um. Four, if we’re making some public appearances, and we’re gonna have to, I need you to learn a few basic rules. Not mine, I mean, the stuff you’d’ve gotten in, like, orientation classes. When you talk to other Dominants, eye contact, acceptable etiquette—maybe I should have you talk to Scott, it’s not like I got the version you need, I always thought submissives just kind of knew stuff, which I’m figuring out from the look on your face is fuckin’ stupid. You’re allowed to laugh at me, go ahead.”   
  
“I’m vastly amused that you’ve divined the existence of our secret telepathic powers. Scott is your brother? The extremely adorable stylish one?”   
  
“Yeah, but now I’m gonna have to kill him, thanks.”   
  
“He loves you,” Sebastian says. “And you love him. I meant adorable in the sense that it’s easy to like him, easy to talk to him, when he’s in a room. He’s one of the charmed people, the fairy-tale people, that way. Which is not always easy.”   
  
“Not helping me not kill him.”   
  
“I prefer you.” He reaches up. Finds Chris’s chest, broad and intriguingly developed, with daring fingers. Chris seems to be holding his breath, confronted with this initiation of intimacy. “I like knowing you’re not everyone’s. You talk to me.”   
  
“You make me want to,” Chris whispers. “What you said…not being everyone’s…me, too. About you. I don’t want to go all caveman-Dominant on you, but…”   
  
“But you’re feeling somewhat possessive? I’ve heard that can happen, yes.”   
  
“I don’t want anyone else touching you,” Chris admits. “I don’t want anyone else looking at you. I want to send you off to write genius music with my handprints on your ass and every inch of you feeling me on top of you, inside you, filling you up with me until you’re dripping with it, because you’re mine and I’m going to keep you safe—”   
  
They both stop. Too much raw emotion in those words. The unsaid _this time_ lurks powerfully in the closest shadow. Thrown into relief by a sofa-arm and city neon.   
  
Sebastian takes a deep breath. Then another, in an attempt to resurface. He’s getting lost in the whirlwind. Love for Chris and Chris’s capacity to feel, and wistfulness for Chris’s grief, painfully radiant. Heartfelt terror: he’s never _belonged_ to anyone before. Equally heartfelt shimmering desire: he’s never belonged to anyone before. And everything Chris just said—spankings, marks, himself bent over the bed with Chris’s climax dripping down his thighs—has gone straight to his cock and his tight-gathered balls. He’s lightheaded with glorious need.   
  
He manages, “I might be in the mood for that, sometimes…”   
  
Chris’s eyes skim over his body, and become correspondingly hotter and sweeter, fire burning blue-green as alchemists’ metals. “Like now?”   
  
“Very much now?”   
  
“Very much now.” Chris slips a hand behind his head, pulls him up, kisses him deep and long and filthy, hand wound into his hair keeping his head tipped back. Sebastian very nearly comes on the spot.   
  
Chris muses, licking at his mouth, teasing flirts of tongue that don’t go deep enough, “One more rule.”   
  
He can only moan; so he does, as his entire body turns into compliant water.   
  
“Easy one. You’ll like it. I said you were mine. And you are. At home, in the bedroom…I’ll do whatever I fuckin’ want with you—everything we’re agreed on, I said I won’t hurt you, I mean it—and you’ll take it.”   
  
“Yes—”   
  
“And you’ll _enjoy_ it.”   
  
Sebastian’s hips jerk involuntarily. “ _Da_ —yes—yes, Chris, please.”   
  
“Do you want me to fuck you here? On your sofa? On the floor?”   
  
Sebastian, trembling, nods frantically. Yes. Oh God yes. Anywhere, anything Chris wants, no shame, Chris could push him up against the window and strip him bare and fuck him where anyone could see, his cock pressed sticky into cool transparent glass, and he’d say yes—   
  
“You’re so fuckin’ beautiful.” Chris sounds awed. Reverent. Almost shy. “And so sweet, look at you, God, how did no one ever—how did I get this damn lucky? You here with me.”   
  
“But,” Sebastian whispers back, because talking is difficult but this matters, “I told you. Different, with you. I never knew—I feel different with you.”   
  
Chris closes his eyes for a second, almost as if the words’ve caused physical pain. Then opens them, and the blue shines with a suggestion of damp. “You trust me that much.”   
  
“You make me want to,” Sebastian tells him, purposeful hope-infused reiteration of the phrase, and wriggles as much as he can with Chris’s heavy hand in his hair. “Fuck me on my sofa, sir?”   
  
“So many kinds of yes,” Chris says. “Stand up for a sec. Clothes off.”   
  
Clothes off. Promptly. Lights flicked on, which Chris hasn’t asked for, but Sebastian wants them and did it without thinking and Chris didn’t object. He wants to be able to see this, Chris kissing him and claiming him and wanting him, in the apartment that’s been his and is now theirs, in the light.   
  
Chris yanks off his t-shirt and throws it someplace behind the couch. Has to lift hips to lose his jeans, where his swelling erection’s tenting denim, gorgeously thick and long. Sebastian’s body remembers how it feels inside him; his hole clenches, empty and needing.   
  
“Wait,” Chris says. “Um. I don’t mean wait, but—lube?”   
  
“Bedroom?”   
  
“Um…go bring me your lube, sub.”   
  
Sebastian raises eyebrows, wants to laugh, wants to obey. “Yes, sir.”   
  
He’s naked, but the evening’s not cold. The carpet tickles his bare toes with anticipation as he pokes around in the appropriate drawer. There’s a pleasant skitter down his spine: he’s doing this, being obedient, because they both want him to.   
  
He doesn’t run, but does walk quickly, on his way back.    
  
And he’s rewarded with the sight of his Dominant leaning back on his couch, one large hand idly pumping his own cock, shaft appearing and disappearing in stages, head flushed and shining. Muscles flex and bend, legs spread; the ink-lines over Chris’s body recite poetry in silent obsidian.   
  
Sebastian almost drops the lube, and has to fumble to recover it.   
  
Chris grins, authoritative and unhurried. “See something you like?”   
  
“ _Eşti frumos,_ ” Sebastian tells him. It’s true. “Beautiful. You.”   
  
“Me? Thought I said that about you.”   
  
“Yes, well…if you get to say it, so do I.” He picks his way across the living room. Narrowly avoids smacking his hip on a side table. He should really get rid of all his furniture. He tends to trip over it anyway. And there could be more floor space. For sex on the floor.   
  
“Fair enough,” Chris concedes. “Come here.” And puts hands on his hips and settles him proprietarily onto one thigh. This is quite nice—Chris’s hands are decided and the thigh nudges his legs apart—but isn’t entirely what he’s craving, which is that iron length inside him _now_.   
  
Chris laughs, kissing his neck, his shoulder. “Impatient, are you? Are we gonna have to work on denial, get you a cock ring, maybe, tie you down and make you beg for it?”   
  
“Yes?” That reply comes out far too fast. But the thought of it, of surrendering so completely and _knowing_ he’ll be kept safe… “Please?”   
  
“Okay, so that’s something you like.” One of Chris’s hands has found his right nipple. Pinching, playing, rolling the bud between fingers. Sebastian can hear himself panting, openmouthed tiny gulps of air. When Chris pinches harder, it hurts, but the hurt spreads out everywhere and in the process becomes ecstasy. “I like you like this, I think…you can’t tell me what you think I want to hear, not now…so honest, the way you come apart for me, everything you want…”   
  
The hand’s ceaseless, delicious torment of his nipple; Sebastian’s close to tears, to that coming apart, from the pain and pleasure, from the unrelieved throb of his untouched cock, from the knowledge that Chris’s cock is right there nudging his hip but he hasn’t been given permission to touch…   
  
“Tell me,” Chris says, moving the hand at last—Sebastian sobs, unsure whether the sensation of reprieve’s good or bad—and tracing shapes along the tingling skin of his inner thigh. “You said you were sore, this morning. Too sore? Because we can do other things.”   
  
“ _Nu_ …no…I don’t think so.” He’s losing English, or maybe every language. Vocabulary sacrificed to bliss. At the moment he’d call it a fair trade. “ _Te doresc_ —I want you—please.”   
  
Chris turns him enough that their eyes meet. Studies his face; must be convinced, because there’s a nod and then Sebastian finds himself lifted, rearranged, fingers spreading the curves of his ass. The fingers are slick; Chris laughs. “You seriously own strawberry-scented lube?”   
  
“Strawberry- _flavored_. I like fruit. I like…berries.” Not his most eloquent sentences, but Chris’s fingers are working him open, easing in, stretching him in preparation for Chris’s cock. He can’t see the process, the way he’s positioned, and that’s another secret shuddering sort of thrill down his spine. He’s letting Chris do this, at Chris’s mercy. He wants more.    
  
The penetration burns, but not badly. Muscles note their recent workout. But they open up and yield for one finger, two, a kind and inexorable three. Sebastian quivers, stuffed full and deluged with sensation; Chris’s other hand steadies him, and Chris’s voice says, “Okay,” and the fingers slip out but there’s no time to mourn the loss, not when he’s being coaxed into position on top, the head of Chris’s cock pushing at his entrance.   
  
Chris moves slowly, being careful even given the assurance of not-too-sore. Sebastian, through the fog of lust and euphoria and capitulation, appreciates the care but wants to feel _more_. He shoves himself lower, taking it; they both gasp, and Chris swears under his breath. “Shh, easy, no rush, I’ve got you—here—”   
  
Big hands on his hips, low-voiced murmurs and breaths and promises in his ear, the thrust of Chris’s cock inside him, the heat of Chris’s skin: they all blur together into waves of rapture. He might be crying again, softly; he hides his face in Chris’s neck and rocks his hips, sending frissons of pleasure outward from that glowing spot.    
  
“Fuck—” Chris catches breath, tenses, freezes in place. “I’m gonna—too close—so fucking beautiful, you, God, can I—faster—”   
  
“ _Da_ —”   
  
Chris’s hips slam up into his, no finesse now that the yes is floating between them; Chris’s hands bite down on his waist, where they must be leaving bruises, but that’s good and that’s welcome, intensity both grounding and dreamlike, every motion outlined in unrelenting white heat. Chris flings one arm around him, pulling him closer, losing rhythm; erratic thrusts turn into one long shuddering groan, and Chris is coming, spurts of orgasm that Sebastian can feel inside himself, washing over that electric bundle of nerves, making them sing.   
  
“God—Sebastian—” Chris gets a hand between them, closes it around Sebastian’s dripping cock. There’s so much wetness he wonders dizzily whether he’s come already, but no, not when the low-lying pleasurable ache of being hard abruptly transmutes into coruscating sharpness at the first stroke. Chris is talking, saying his name, saying now, saying _for me_ , and he comes that way, in Chris’s lap on the sofa with the open windows, with Chris’s cock buried inside him and Chris’s hand wrapped around his length.   
  
He’s none too aware after that, simply floating; Chris eases him up and back down onto the couch and then stretches out with him, rubbing his back, kissing his forehead, saying words to form more anchors. He thinks Chris possibly cleans them both up—with what he has no clue—but he’s not even awake enough to offer to assist. Honeyed lassitude all through his bones.   
  
He also thinks he hears Chris say at one point, “I love you, you know,” but that can’t be right. Must be dreaming. Chris wants him and cares about him and wanted to marry him, but Chris has also witnessed him colliding with doors and getting commands wrong and falling to panicked pieces when asked about blindfolds or a collar. Chris doesn’t love him.    
  
Drifting in the afterglow, it’s nice to pretend he heard it right, at least.   
  
Chris kisses his eyebrow this time. Sebastian blinks and yawns, waking up—the sudden entirely explicable melancholy’s done a decent job of bringing him back—and Chris smiles. It’s a tender fond sort of smile. “Back with me? How’re you feeling?”   
  
“Here, yes…a bit sore. Not bad.” He might be understating the case a hairsbreadth, but only by a very thin hair. “You were wonderful. _Incredibil_.”   
  
“Incredible?” Chris brushes a wayward bit of couch-fuzz out of Sebastian’s face. They’re both sweaty and sticky and the poor sofa will never be the same. But it feels content, he decides. “How sore, exactly?”   
  
“Oh…not very. You are rather large. I could use a shower. You can—is that your shirt? You used your shirt to—to—”   
  
“I wasn’t gonna use _your_ shirt,” Chris says, all earnest puppy-dog eyes and sincere muscles, “and I don’t care, it’s just a shirt?”   
  
“Yes, but…did you in fact bring a change of clothes?”   
  
Chris’s expression slowly slides into dismay. “I…didn’t think of that.”   
  
“Never mind,” Sebastian sighs, “we can do laundry, and you can borrow something of mine, assuming I’ve got anything that’ll fit you and your distracting arms, sir,” and Chris’s face brightens right up. “Distracting?”   
  
“Extravagantly so. Shower?”   
  
“Shower,” Chris says, “and then I get to feed you again, I did promise, if you thought I’d forget promising you that then you’re crazy,” and rolls to his feet and offers a hand up. Sebastian takes it.   
  
“Yes, sir. Chris?”   
  
“I’m planning to wrap you up in blankets and feed you more of your apples and hold you in bed after we shower, just so you know. What?”    
  
“I like your plan. I also like my sofa.”   
  
“So do I.” Chris dives in to land a kiss on the edge of Sebastian’s mouth, while unsubtly getting an arm in for support when Sebastian’s legs wobble. “I fuckin’ love your sofa.”   
  
“I’d like to keep that sofa,” Sebastian tells him, “when we move.”   
  
Chris stares at him, eyes and mouth wide. Sebastian blushes, and is irritated that he can feel the heat of it spreading to his chest and ears.   
  
“What did I do,” Chris asks at last, “to deserve you saying yes to me?”   
  
Sebastian shrugs. Flips on the water. Leans into Chris’s warmth, after. He doesn’t have an answer. He’s not amazing. He’s just himself. Science fiction and awkwardness and walking into doors.   
  
Chris kisses his hair, not pushing for an answer, letting the question be rhetorical if it wants to be. And Sebastian thinks about curling up in bed with those strong arms around him, being hand-fed apple slices and cheddar out of generous fingers; about maybe ordering Chinese-food delivery and watching late-nineties comedy movies while naked under blankets; about fortune-cookie futures and apartment listings online, places they might be able to go and see together in the days to come.    
  
Chris is happy. He can feel as much in the heartbeat under his hand where it’s come to rest. Chris doesn’t love him, but is happy with him, and Sebastian’s chest hurts with how good that feels.    
  
And that is love, at least it is for him, and it’s a spear-point and it’s deadly and it’s wonderful and it’s scary, because he’s starting to believe that this can work, that he can be this fortunate, that he can have Chris and this marriage and his family and his life. He doesn’t want to let himself believe it in case the mirage vanishes, but it’s just imperfect enough that he thinks it might be real.   
  
“You’re smiling,” Chris says. “I can feel it.”   
  
“Thinking about fortune cookies,” Sebastian says, and watches steam billow merrily out to fill up the miniscule bathroom. “I told you I haven’t been grocery shopping, but we could order Chinese.”


End file.
